The Ritual
by Whelpie
Summary: A man dreams about a bizarre ritual.


I was dreaming. That much was certain. The black skies overhead let almost no light through, leaving me in almost total darkness. The only light I saw was ahead, between the trees. I couldn't make out what was casting it, and I carefully made my way forward to investigate. Before me was a field, and in the middle of it, a small hill. Around the hill, a throng had gathered. The light was coming from a few torches on top of the hill, and the dim light gave me only a vague idea of the number of people gathered here - it could be a few dozen, or it could be over a hundred. As I looked, they seemed to me nothing but an amorphous mass of bodies. What instead drew my attention were the shapes on top of the hill - five people, seemingly perfoming a ritual on some sort of alter, on which the torch was placed. Though I was afraid, my curiosity was none the less stronger, and I moved closer, across the field, to the outskirts of the throng. I was barely noticed, the participants being fully enraptured in the events on top of the hill. I looked up myself. The five people were wearing dark hoods, with one having hers cast back to reveal a shaved head, covered in tattoos. She was holding some sort of statuette aloft, speaking words in a tongue that I could not understand, even though I remember the sounds quite well, even now.

"Thgf'vthia rak'gcl Soath trhsalth'hr!"

Each time she said the words, they were repeated by the other four people on the hill, and then by the crowd around me. Though I did not understand the words, that merely added to my unease at hearing these people chant them. The sounds were not human, they did not sound like anything that originated from human throats - if I could not see these people speaking the words for myself, I would have insisted that it must be some sort of audio manipulation that resulted in these terrible sounds. But, I reasoned to myself, it was a dream, such things were common in dreams. And yet, even knowing that, there was still some deeply-buried part of my brain that filled me with utter dread at hearing the words. The chanting grew louder, and as it did, I saw the clouds began to change above us. They started churning hatefully as thick raindrops started falling down. I found myself fascinated as flashes of lightning lit up the field for seconds at a time. But even though I waited, no thunder seemed to follow. Nothing but the eerie lights piercing the darkness.

I looked back up at the ritual. It occurred to me that the chanting had stopped. Everything was deadly quiet, save for the sound of the rainfall. The torch was sputtering pathetically, having been almost extinguished by the rain. The movement of the clouds above seemed to intensify, until suddenly a bolt of lightning seared its way through the clouds and downwards, hitting the alter directly, and splitting it in two. It appeared almost as if reality itself was tearing at the seams, splitting apart due to this profane ritual, lashing out in response to the sheer and utter _wrongness_ of the events below. The bolt hung in the air for what seemed like an unnatural amount of time, before eventually dissipating. It seemed it had struck and killed, or at least incapacited, one of the hooded people on the hill. This did not seem to cause any particular uproar, nor even provoke any sort of reaction, with the remaining four members of the congregation up there remaining stoically indifferent, their arms outspread.

Something started happening in the crowd. I could smell blood, and I heard the sound of flesh tearing and that of bones breaking. I heard a gurgling death rattle to my right. A flash of lightning illuminated the scene before me. Amongst the people there, I saw shapes that seemed utterly wrong - not human, not even animals, but something else entirely. Yet, as I tried to get a grasp on the things, they seemed to change with each glimpse of lightning. The sounds of carnage and the rain both stopped suddenly as the clouds parted above. Rather than the familiar sight of the Milky Way, however, what was above seemed utterly alien. A completely different sky, unfamiliar, littered with strange phenomena that made less sense the more I observed them, stars moving of their own volition, though nearly fast enough to be meteors, and a swirling nebula which seemed to move closer and closer. I felt pain as my eyes began watering, and I could tell that my senses were straining to fully comprehend what I was seeing. Something came out through the hole in space.

It was a shape, or perhaps a series of shapes, though they seemed utterly impossible, with geometry that pointed inwards and outwards at the same time, collapsing in on itself, constantly changing between different colors, none of which I could have even hoped to try and name, as no names could hope to described them. Around the shape, the air itself shimmered and seemed to break apart at its mere touch, reality itself unable to cope with whatever this thing was. Somehow, I knew that it was alive, for its mental presence filled my mind, to the point where I had trouble discerning where it ended and I began. Even now, as I describe it, I can feel its tendrils still, and the name, its name, it fills any empty space in my mind even now, unbidden and unwelcome. Soath. Soath. Even in a dream, I struggled to keep myself intact, I struggled to retain myself in the face of this being. How long I stood there, I cannot say. I saw many things. I saw the death of humanity, and I saw our own cosmic unimportance through the eyes of what I can only describe as an uncaring god. Even as I look through the pages of the Bible now, I am frightened. For deep down I know that I have glimpsed the face of divinity - and I could not imagine a greater horror.


End file.
